• Oops! We just got back from an almost week long outage. Apparently the ISP where the server is hosted decided to reassign its IP addresses and forgot to mention it to our contact. Since we don't have direct contact with the ISP, getting help on technical problems tends to be slow. We are considering options to change this situation but for now we just say "thank you for the free hosting" :)
• Also, even though I haven't done much with this site in the last 2 years I HAVE been tweaking the database a little and doing a few updates here and there as well as adding a couple new projects. I do hope to implement some new features in the nearish future. Right now I'm kind of busy at work and all that but somewhere I will find some time!

• NEW FEATURE! I have added a detailed host statistics page that lists out all the data I get about hosts. Host project distribution pie charts were also added (and slightly modified for better display). As I was making the detailed host page the idea occurred to me to add a feature to display multiple hosts side-by-side. Not sure how many people will use it but it wasn't too hard and seemed like a good idea at the time so there you have it. I have also changed my cross-project update so that host IDs should now remain the same instead of changing every day. This allows you to bookmark cross-project host pages.
• New projects added. I recently added uFluids and SIMAP to my list of supported projects. More may be coming.

• Major outage! Well so far 2006 hasn't been so good to my stats. :( The server that hosts these stats mysteriously went offline around January 12th. We knew there was a major move planned from one data center to another within Atlanta so we figured this was it. No big deal. However after a couple of days it was obvious that something else was going on. Unfortunately our contact in Atlanta was out of the state and we were unable to contact him. After the first week we decided it was time to start looking for other options for colocating the server. After a week of searching and sending out dozens of requests for price quotes We actually found several places (in Kansas City) that were affordable but of course we still had to get the server from Atlanta. But by this time we had gotten in touch with the guy from Atlanta and he said he would contact the right people and get us back up as soon as possible. This proved slower than desirable but the server DID come back online during the week however there were some major networking problems somewhere as we were seeing 50% packet loss. By this time we had a direct contact within the colocation facility. He relocated the server yesterday (the 7th) and the networking problems were cleared up.
• Fallout: It turns out the server was powered and running the entire time - it just didn't have network access. However the sudden drop of the network connection without warning meant that I was not able to get an up-to-date backup of my database to import into my testing server here at hoem to keep the history tables accurate. Meanwhile, the history update scripts were being run every night on the server as usual but with old data. So at this point about the best I can do is to leave things pretty much the way they are. The history graphs are all flat for the past month or so until today where they jumped up (or down) like crazy. I will just let the data shift as the days progress. This will make some of the graphs hard to read but there isn't much I can do at this point. It also looks like a few of the smaller projects were able to get an update through all the packet loss last week so those graphs aren't quite as flat.
• All that... to say Sorry about the outage. I try to be a reliable source of BOINC team and user stats but obviously that didn't happen this month. We are attempting to get more contact info for people who will be in physical proximity to the server at all times so that an outage like this will not happen again.

• Added Host list to user pages. I have been importing host data for a while and have used it in some general, project-wide stats but haven't really done anything interesting with it. I finally got around to adding a host list to the individual user pages. I decided to make the host list the default view on the user page. The history graphs are still available via the links. Next I will be working on a project-wide host list and individual host details page - just like I have for teams and users.
  NOTE: You must have your project preferences set to not hide your hosts in order for them to show up under your account on my site.
• Cross project hosts! The BOINC client has been generating host Cross-project IDs for a while now. It has taken a while for users to upgrade to clients that support this feature and for all the projects to update their servers to include this field in their database and XML stats export. A majority of hosts now have this field filled out so it is finally usable. It also took some very interesting (and long) SQL to make combining half a million hosts even feasible without a super computer but somehow I managed :)
  If you are still running an ancient client (before 4.45 I think), your host CPID will not be filled out and your host(s) will not show up in the combined stats.
• Stylesheet changes. I honestly don't know much about CSS and have been blindly bumping around somehow making it kind of work in various places on this site. Most settings such as font, font size, etc were all left to the user's default browser settings. This is still mostly the case but I have been trying to learn more. I reduced the font size for most text to allow more information to be displayed on a screen. I will try getting the hang of it more and giving my site a makeover at some point although I'm really not much of a graphics "look and feel" guy. I do code and data manipulation but I'm not all that great at making things pretty. Oh well - the data is what really counts, right? :)

• Added more projects. I have added 3 projects to my database: Sztaki Desktop grid, BURP and Rosetta@Home.

• Moved graphs. In order to improve organization within the file system of the site I decided to move all the graphs into a "graphs" subdirectory. This will break direct links to them from other websites but you know... that isn't really my problem :)

• Added a new feature: Overall project stats! It has been a while but I finally managed to finish this page. It shows data from a table that is updated once per day and includes information such as the total credit for all users combined, the number of teams/users/hosts and such. This is an initial version - I might be tweaking it a bit. The page can be accessed by clicking on the project name on the front page or the project logo graphic on top of every page. The links no longer point to the project home pages.
• Changed the page header. The header that is displayed on almost every page was using tables for layout which is frowned upon these days. I changed it to use CSS divs instead. Note: if you make your browser window too small (under 800 pixels) it will do strange things :) Thanks to AthlonRob for help on this.
• Removed the Pirates project. I have disabled the display of the pirates project. I still have the tables in the database and may make a list of inactive projects but considering its limited credit and non-scientific nature I might just drop it alltogether.

• Tweaked the definition of "active" users again. As mentioned below, LHC is recalculating RAC and has no intention of stopping. CPDN also does this. So in order for my code to work for all projects I have once again changed the definition of "active" to "has a RAC (expavg_credit field) of more than 5". 5 seems to yield a number approximately equal to the previous definition but will work for all projects.

• Changed the definition of "active" users. Until now I have been defining an "active user" as someone with more than 0 credit. This was a holdover from the first couple of months after seti@home went live with BOINC. They were exporting 3 million 0 credit users that were imported from seti classic. The easiest way to tell which people were doing work in BOINC was to see if they had any credit. However this became outdated a long time ago but I never changed my code. Now I have finally done it and an "active user" is now defined as a user who has been granted credit in the last 14 days. This is based on the expavg_time field in the XML. The only problem now is that LHC@home is currently updating the expavg_time field every day or two so I have no way of telling wether or not a user is active. I have bugged them about it. hopefully they will see the light :)

• Back up at http://stats.kwsn.net ! As mentioned below, these stats pages were hosted on a server donated by a Swedish team member. Unfortunately the server became unreliable in February and we were no longer able to contact the person hosting it for us. I guess it was too good to be true. So the stats moved back to my home box for the time being. But The Knights Who Say Ni! did not give up! They pulled together and donated over $2,000 USD which allowed us to purchase our own server with remote managemet capabilities so hopefully downtime will be minimal from now on.
• For those who are interested, here is what $2,300 will get you in 2005:
  • Model: Dell PowerEdge(tm) 1850 "High-Speed 1U Rack Server"
  • CPU: Dual 2.8 GHz Xeons
  • RAM: 1 GB of DDR2 PC3200 400MHz ECC/registered (free upgrade from 256 MB - dell special)
  • Hard drive: 2 x 73GB 10K RPM Ultra 320 SCSI Hard Drive in RAID-1 configuration (RAID controller was also a free dell special)
  • Other drives: 24x CD-ROM, 1.44MB Floppy Drive (required for the DRAC4 for some reason)
  • Remote management: Dell Remote Access Card, 4th Generation, for PowerEdge (DRAC4)
  • Hardware support: 3Yr BASIC NBD: L1 Hardware Queue, Next Business Day Onsite M-F 8am-6pm
  We expect this setup to last us for a while to come. The Remote Management card is really nifty because it allows us to access the server remotely as if we were sitting in front of it. Even if the operating system (freeBSD) were to completely crash, we could still access the remote management card and power cycle the machine.
• Also during this time I fixed a few bugs in my code although I didn't touch it very much since my server here at home was the primary server so I couldn't do too much monkeying around for fear that I might break something and screw up the whole site :) But I did fix a couple of bugs in the cross-project stats which caused user account and team creation dates to be displayed incorrectly

• Changed the front page a bit. Added a permanent link to this page. Also hacked together a form that sends you straight into EFnet's webchat applet when you click on the button. It should log you in to #setiathome on EFnet with a nick of the form "StatsX" where X is a random number between 0 and 9 (to avoid nick collisions)
• Changed the way the page header is generated. Before, each page was generating its own DOCTYPE tag and <HEAD> section. This duplicated a lot of code so I stuck it all in head.php and just passed in a title string that it puts in the title. There shouldn't be any visible changes.
• Improved error handling on some pages. Once again, not noticable unless you somehow get a bad link somewhere.

• Changed the way history is kept for the non-combined projects. I was using user CPIDs to record history however this meant that every time you join a new project you run the risk of completely wiping out your history graphs since your CPID can change when you join a new project. This was obviously not a good solution for long-term history. I now use the project-specific database ID that will never change to keep track of history for all the non-combined stats. The combined stats still use the CPID since the userid field is not guaranteed to be the same every time the cross-project update script runs. I might be able to fix this with some more work but it isn't a high priority at the moment.

• Welcome back from a nasty 4 day server outage. Unfortunately I am still not sure why the server crashed. A complete lack of logs could indicate a kernel panic as opposed to a malicious attack but other evidence suggests some kind of fork bomb (wether malicious or some debian process gone wrong, I can only speculate). Anyway, I am back up and running. Unfortunately my history tables weren't updated during the outage and some problems with Seti@home's XML files during the same time caused the tables on my backup server to become corrupted as well so I just advanced the history tables by 4 days manually. You will notice this as a 4 day flat line in your history graphs. Sorry but that is the best I could do :( I will be investigating ways of taking better precautions against this type of failure in the future. Now back to the stats!

• Changed database backend
  Instead of hardcoding the project name, id, URL, etc. I now have them in a database table. This should make adding new projects much easier and give me fewer headaches in the process.
• Fixed a bunch of HTML nastiness
  I had never run my pages through an HTML validator and when I did, I saw just how icky my output was! The team and user listing tables didn't even have beginning <tr> tags! Browsers these days are WAY too forgiving! Oh well... most of that should be fixed now.
• Tweaked RAC (Recent Average Credit)
  I have changed my XML import program to recalculate RAC as it is inserted into the database. RAC is a constantly changing value since it is based on the amount of time that has passed since you were last granted credit by a project. If you stop returning work for a given project, RAC will no longer be updated and will remain artificially high. To compensate for this I now recalculate RAC as of the time the XML dump is performed by the project. If you are active on a project this will not affect you to any noticable degree. It is only if you are inactive that your RAC will be decayed. While this may leaad to your RAC being lower on my site as opposed to other stats sites, this will be a more accurate reflection of how you are really doing.

• Stats site moved to new server: http://stats.kwsn.net
  Thanks to a generous donation by SeRvEr163, a member of The Knights Who Say Ni!, the team now has a dedicated server on a dedicated connection that we can use as we see fit. I have decided to move my stats site here because my residential cable connection (throuch Cox communications) tends to be unreliable and they block port 80 (which is why I had to use port 5520). Also, this will allow me to use my home server as a testbed for upgrades. This way I can make more changes to the system without having to worry about the site becoming unavailable to all of you when I misplace a ) or forget a ;
• User history graphs are now officially online
  Check your user stats page. There is one known problem... Since I use your CPID to look up your history information in the database, if your CPID changes, your history data will effectively be wiped out. I am working on a way to correct this but it might be a couple of days/weeks before I have it online.

• Einstein@home
  Einstein@home seems to be approaching some kind of activity. They have started exporting XML stats.
• User hitory graphs
  User graphs are almost ready. It has taken me a little longer than expected but hey...

• User pages
  Thats right! I have finally added users to my pages instead of only dealing with teams. Even so, you should still join The Knights Who Say Ni! Details here
  As of right now the only user graphs I have are a cross project work distribution pie chart (on the cross-project stats pages only). As soon as I get some history tables in place with a few days worth of data, I will also have user comparison graphs just like I do for teams now.
• Big change to team pages
  With my user stats coming online, the user name will now be linked to the user's stats page instead of to the user's URL. The user's URL will be listed on their stats page.
• Search page
  Finally an easier way to search for your team (and now also your user name). I decided I didn't want people clicking 'next page' a million times trying to find themselves in my user stats so I made it a bit easier. Besides going to the search page and selecting all the options, there is also a small form at the top of the user/team list pages that allows you to do a quick search for that project.
• New start page
  I had to change the start page to accomodate the user stats so I went ahead and switched from straight html to a little php action to enable the last update time to be displayed right up front.

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